Judy Gibson

This concept endangers all humankind—in fact, all life on Earth—and ought to be declared illegal by the United Nations. Nothing could be more prejudicial to world peace than creating technological devices that decide who is to live and who is to die, and destroying habitats and homes of ‘enemies’. An enemy, as our world history shows us clearly, is a person or group of people or nation, or institution, whose point of view does not, for a period of time, agree with our own. The civilized method of dealing with this situation calls for intelligence, patience, discussion, agreement, recognition and acknowledgment of cultural and environmental differences, etc. Religion has failed hugely, although individuals who are altruistic exist in reasonably large numbers, and many of them are people of faith. Our real problem on this earth is greed for power…and so we will ultimately extinguish ourselves and all on the planet, with our selfish desire to obtain that power. Such weapons are the dream of those powerhungry villains of every race, nationality, religion; I see no bright future in this 21st century.

Killer Robots have been a fixture of science fiction for decades but now they are becoming a very real possibility.

The Canadian Campaign to Stop Killer Robots works for a ban on fully autonomous weapons (robotic weapons that can choose and fire on targets without any human intervention unlike drones that continue to have a human at the controls from a remote location). We believe that the creation of fully autonomous weapons is a line that should not be crossed. We are calling for a pre-emptive and comprehensive ban on the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons. The prohibition should be achieved through Canadian national law and an international treaty.

The Canadian Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has multiple moral, ethical, legal, technical and policy concerns with the prospect of fully autonomous weapons. It believes that humans should not delegate the responsibility of making lethal decisions in conflict to machines. The development of fully autonomous weapons and the associated risks to civilians are an affront to Canadian values of humanitarianism, personal responsibility, peace, order and good governance.

403 SIGNATURES

GOAL: 1,000 signatures

I find the idea of machines making life or death decisions in conflict abhorrent. I call on the Government of Canada to immediately prohibit the development and deployment of fully autonomous weapons (killer robots) in Canada and to support efforts to create a pre-emptive global ban on the technology.